Friday, September 05, 2014

"Life is something that happens on the edge"

This post contains some additional notes and comments to my review of The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf, which is published here.

I suggested the Telegraph use this photograph with the review because it's striking, of course, but also because the archaea growing in the Silex Spring live at the edge. For significance of that, see below.

Here is an attempt at humour that, wisely, did not make the final edit:

One of my favourite books is The Pooh Perplex. One of my least favourite viruses is Herpes Simplex. So I was intrigued when I first heard the title of this book. What on Earth (or beyond it), I wondered, could be The Copernicus Complex?

Copernicus...was wrong. Among the things that he (and indeed Kepler and Newton) did not know is that, far from being fixed, the Sun itself is moving through space at about 200 kilometres per second, completing a rotation of the galactic centre once every 240 million years or so.

... small differences...can turn out to make all the difference.Before the edit the second paragraph continued:

Nature is subtle and “little” things can be clues to much bigger mysteries. And in time even the Kepler's laws of planetary motion (and the laws of motion and gravitation which Isaac Newton developed towards the end of the same century) have proven to be only approximations. An anomaly in the orbit of Mercury supported Einstein's general theory of relativity (1916), which challenged basic assumptions in all physics to date. Further, in the last couple of decades unprecedented computing power has enabled researchers to show that even apparently well-established elliptical paths can actually be far from fixed. In the long run seemingly small perturbations can, and often do, cause planets to careen off course into their host stars or each other or go whizzing off into deep space.

With the recent work of the Kepler spacecraft, searching for planets favorable for life, we can estimate that only about one millionth of one billionth of 1 percent of the material of the visible universe exists in living form. From a cosmic perspective, we and all life are the exception to the rule.

I really did enjoy this book but there were moments when I felt it could be shorter with no loss of quality. For example, do we really need another explanation of Bayes's theorem just to be told that it is ill-advised to draw conclusions when you have a sample size of one? Perhaps I have just read too much popular science.

Earthlike planets in the
Goldilocks zone...are a small
minority ...albeit a minority that contains billions!

the cosmo-chaotic principle this idea is the heart of the book, and I would have liked to have got there sooner and read more about it including, for example, an expansion of this:

Several people who are studying the
biological universe have suggested we adopt this way of
conceptualizing life, as a phenomenon hovering on the bring of
disorder. Michael Storrie-Lombardi – life is something that happens
on the edge, wherever that edge appears...life is a collection of
phenomena at the boundary between order and chaos. Across that
interface we can imagine there is something akin to a voltage
difference. Except this biological gradient is multidimensional, an
intersection of available energy, order and disorder, and time.